


The fatigue properties of stranded wire

by UrsulaKohl



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Calendar, Committee meetings, Crafts, Gen, Shuos, Suicide formations, Typical hexarchate unpleasantness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-05 23:40:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13398732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrsulaKohl/pseuds/UrsulaKohl
Summary: Zehun was not technically a member of the Shuos' hexarchate heresy committee.  Mikodez was not technically paying attention to anything besides his newest craft.





	The fatigue properties of stranded wire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [venndaai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/gifts).



The Shuos' hexarchate heresy committee (SHH) was small. Shockingly small, if one assumed that the purpose of the faction was to monitor and squelch dissent: there were only five members, with Hexarch Mikodez acting ex officio as the lucky sixth. (Zehun, always present and always taking notes, did not count; neither did their cat Jienji.) In actuality the hexarch had directed that, given a finite budget and an infinite supply of potential heresies, the Shuos should concentrate on threats from outside the hexarchate, and on monitoring the other factions.

Mikodez's end of the table was covered with spools of wire: copper, red, gold-colored, what looked like real silver plate, and a purple shade that glinted like a designer medication. Risya, the newest member, examined the mess, tugging on one of her corkscrew curls. Risya was an expert in calendrical cryptography, the exploitation of local terrain to speed or slow a codebreaking attempt. She had the cheerful and bubbly demeanor of someone whose routine response to threat was to overwrite her opponent's files with forged confessions of heresy. "What sort of bomb is that?" she asked.

"I'm weaving wire!" Mikodez answered, brandishing a wooden dowel. "Or knitting it, though I'm pretty sure the loops loop differently. You should learn: a woven choker would look stunning with that blouse."

Zehun laughed internally as the other committee members launched a diversionary assault on the snacks. "Are these stars made from bean paste, or fish sausage?" the analyst Vesh asked. They seemed to regard the lack of wine and the prospect of a crafting lesson with equal horror. Zehun, on the other hand, was pleased that Mikodez had sustained attention to anything long enough to learn a new craft: in the first year after Istradez' death, he had cycled from knitting to board games to practicing assassination techniques in at best twenty-minute increments.

Mikodez took pity on Vesh, and started the meeting. The first presentation was from Technical Director Psov. Psov was dressed like an analyst, in a uniform jacket three sizes too large for his lanky frame and trousers in a subtly clashing shade of brown, though his true talents entailed identifying profitable Andan investment schemes and persuading people to work another six hours of overtime. 

The Vidona had arrested a dissident whose particular heresy involved branding herself with designs from jeng-zai cards. Psov summoned a hologram of one of the designs: it hovered above the conference room table, casting sharp-edged shadows on the tray of cookies. The particular symbolism, especially the empty and closed circles linked in a bipartite graph, seemed too precise for an amateur calendrical adjustment. "My group's simulations show that this will provide a slight advantage in mental arithmetic, on the order of two extra digits easily accessible in working memory," Psov reported. "But the interesting thing happens when several heretics of this sort interact."

"It . . . Wait, can you enlarge that graph?" Risya asked.

Psov obliged. The shadows softened into tones of terra cotta and dried blood.

Risya grinned. "That's beautiful! It's like a lens. If you have an even number of heretics, especially-- the local calendrical effects are enhanced."

"Kujen?" Vesh asked. SHH was always on the lookout for Kujen's test heresies: the Nirai shadow hexarch often engaged in experimentation prior to suggesting changes to the official calendar.

"It's an interesting data point," another analyst replied. "We haven't seen a trace of him for a while, but this is roughly the appropriate sector."

Zehun's augment reported an incoming call. Oddly, it was from the Vidona. Mikodez's eyebrows rose as he registered the same thing. He nodded at Vesh, delegating them to answer. They shoved their chair away from the table and left the room, taking care not to let Jienji the cat saunter out with them. 

Psov changed the display from the heretic's brands to a map, marking similar heresies and sightings of Kujen by reddish and greenish stars. The committee settled in to debate whether to follow up, or transfer responsibility to the working group that monitored the Nirai.

Vesh returned a few minutes later, their squarish face displaying a studied lack of expression. "The prisoner has died in questioning," they reported.

Risya said what everyone was thinking: "They usually do."

"She died at the beginning of questioning."

Psov's breath huffed, sharply; Risya laughed in disbelief. The other committee members had the bland, masked faces that in Shuos passed for shock, and were taking copious notes. The Vidona's list of talents was not long, but only killing people on purpose was definitely at the top.

Mikodez picked up on Risya's inquiry: "How many people have died at the beginning of a Vidona session, in recent days?"

Vesh pulled out their tablet and started entering commands. "Ten," they said.

* * *

  
The next day Zehun took their smarter cat, Fenez, to Vesh's office. They were glad of the cabled cardigan their second son had knitted. Vesh was the sort of person who would have worn short sleeves in the midst of a blizzard, if the Shuos had had the bad taste to locate their headquarters on a planet with blizzards instead of a space station, and their office was always too cold.

"Do the ten dead people have Kujen in common?" Zehun asked. There was no harm in addressing the obvious hypothesis early.

"Not that I've uncovered," Vesh answered. They pulled up a massive spreadsheet decorated with a rainbow of colors and nine different kinds of asterisks. "And there's no faction connection either, that I can see. One supervised a crew of servitors that subcontracted cleaning work for the Rahal, another was a cook for an investment bank cafeteria"-- because financial institutions were run by the Andan, their cafeterias were unusually good-- "and a third worked in a Nirai-run call center. But as heretics go, these seem to have been rather dull, ordinary people."

Fenez mewed the whirring mew that indicated insufficient attention was being paid to her. Zehun dutifully petted her. "What's that pinkish column on the far right?"

"Oh," Vesh said, "there must be some overlap in personal effects, beyond the usual tablets and augments." They gestured at the screen, and the spreadsheet was replaced by a matrix of images: bracelets and necklaces made of tubular, braided wire, gleaming softly. A few held stones or icons in a sort of woven cage, but most were plain.

Vesh sighed. "It's that craft the hexarch was working on. It must be more of a fad than I thought."

Zehun watched fluff from Fenez's coat drift softly to the office floor, and sighed to themself for a different reason. It was time for jewelry lessons.

* * *

  
Zehun had a detailed and meticulous exercise scheme, and could certainly have murdered multiple attackers at the least provocation. Even so, the older they got, the more they disliked planetary gravity. They let themselves appear stiff and slow, though really they needn't have bothered: nobody ever thought "undercover Shuos assassin" after you'd spent twelve minutes forcing them to admire images of your new great-grandchild.

It hadn't been hard to find a wire-weaving meetup. All they had to do was compliment people's bracelets, and ask whether they'd invented the design themselves. Finding the right meetup had been harder, but Zehun had high hopes for this one. An actual weaver ran it, in the back room of the teahouse next door to her shop. She seemed to be about Zehun's age, though she had thus far only attained grandchildren. Most of the other attendees were older, as well. There was one teenager who wore shapeless, brightly colored tunics clearly selected as the antithesis to a school uniform. A woman in her early thirties, Laraad, had a bag with a pendant of black tassels and feathers, representing a Kel sibling or spouse lost in action.

The process of weaving wire wasn't difficult, either. You set up a flower in stiff wire, making six loops, or nine, or some other felicitous number. That formed a temporary base at the bottom of the dowel; the real, production wire looped around, again and again. Zehun had fixed enough projects for Mikodez, and their actual children, to pick up the process quickly. They chatted pleasantly with the other meetup attendees, and amused themselves by planning which wire would make the best garrote.

It took three meetups to learn about Laraad's dead Kel relative. They had been infantry, but they died out of formation, tripping over an improvised bomb on their way to a florist's shop. They were also the closest anyone in the meetup had come to a genuine faction member. The teenager Yethny's parents wanted them to apply to one of the tertiary Nirai academies, to study chemical engineering, but their heart was clearly in more esoteric barista work-- they doctored their tea with a selection of meticulously arranged powders-- and they resented any sign of adult officiousness. Zehun tried one of the powders, in their rented apartment, while waiting for Psov to send the day's vid of Jienji and Fenez eating fish; the drug induced a moderately pleasant mental fizzing effect, though it wasn't really up to Shuos standard.

It took five meetings before Zehun told their own invented story, about their third child, the married son who made the mistake of flirting with an Andan alt but not wanting to go home with them, and afterward never remembered the names of his spouses, or their baby daughter.

"None of the faction members believe in us," Yethny said. "Not really."

"We are all part of the hexarchate," the weaver Sziruja said, evenly.

Not long afterward, Yethny finally finished looping the necklace they'd been working on. They removed the dowel, and used pliers to drag the remaining braid through a series of wooden holes, each time making the necklace longer and more flexible. "I can't believe I started with six loops," they said. "I might as well have recited a remembrance, while I was at it."

"The key to the structure isn't the number of loops," Sziruja pointed out. "It's the space between, that you fill as you pull your work through the drawplate. That's what provides strength, and flexibility."

Laraad glanced at the pendant on her bag, as if she had just noticed the dead feathers' brittleness.

"You're so productive, Sziruja," Zehun said, tactfully adjusting the subject. "Every week I see you finishing a different project, and you're running your main weaving business, too. How do you find the time?"

"It's easiest if you make a habit of it," Sziruja answered. "I find it's simplest to work a little, every day. After the evening remembrance, for example. When you're doing one thing every day, it's easy to add another thing after it. And it's nice to have a concrete task after the remembrance, really, to clear one's mind a bit."

"And if you don't have time, then?" Zehun asked. "I always seem to be cooking, for one grandchild or another. It's only because Nand's spouse Frassi is so helpful that I made it out tonight."

"Even a visualization is enough. Sometimes I just think about the very end step, the space between loops, slowly drawn tighter-- Yethny, have you chosen fittings, yet?"

* * *

  
"There are more than a trillion people in the hexarchate," Zehun reported to Mikodez. They kept a tight hold on Jienji, lest she try to lick the copper wire. "If even a sixth of one percent of them practice the same visualization just after the evening remembrance, that's going to shift the calendar. Risya ran the simulations."

"Shift it toward better crafting?" Mikodez asked. "Toward Andan jewelry designers? What is the advantage?"

"Risya ran that simulation, too. With sufficient practice, and under sufficient stress, if you visualize the wire drawing tighter and tighter, you die. It's like one of the Kel suicide formations, but not as flashy."

Mikodez shut his eyes, slowly. Zehun threw their shawl at him, then dropped Jienji on top. She yowled in protest.

"It won't work for you. You are the _fox hexarch._ "

Mikodez shrugged Jienji onto the rug, and struggled out from under the shawl. "Am I not under sufficient stress? Have I not practiced weaving wire? You've got contingency plans in place, even if you don't like them."

"The effect only works for people who aren't already faction members. It's like the Nirai or the Andan power, very specific."

"You talked this through with Risya already," Mikodez said, annoyed. "Stop being mysterious and tell me who benefits."

"People who want to control the timing of their deaths."

Mikodez spun his purple wire and watched the spool wobble. "People who don't want to be executed at auspicious times, specifically."

"Yes."

"This could destroy the entire calendar."

"Yes."

"Not Kujen. Cheris?"

"We suspect," Zehun answered, "that the architect's not part of a faction at all."

"Well!" Mikodez declared. "We will have to find this person. For the good of the hexarchate."

Zehun stroked Jienji, and listened to her purr.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, O hapless green onion, for beta-reading!
> 
> Outside the hexarchate, this method of making a flexible wire chain is known, variously, as Viking wire weaving, Viking knit, or trichinopoly chain.


End file.
